Which is the optimal adjuvant chemotherapy for resected pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma?: A protocol for a network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

BACKGROUND: Although adjuvant chemotherapy has been shown to reduce relapse and prolong survival after surgery, it is still unclear which adjuvant chemotherapy regimen will be favorable over the all adjuvant treatments evaluated for patients with resected pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. METHODS: PubMed, Embase (Ovid version), Cochrane Library, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and ClinicalTrials.gov database will be searched from their inception to January 19, 2019. We will include studies that contain adjuvant chemotherapy following surgery in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. The outcomes are overall survival, disease-free survival, and grade 3–4 hematological and nonhematological toxicity. The risk of bias for each randomized controlled trial will be assessed as low, moderate, or high using Cochrane Collaboration's tool independently. Pairwise and network meta-analysis will be performed using STATA 13.0, GeMTC, and WinBUGS, respectively. The competing adjuvant chemotherapy regimens will be ranked by an advantage index. RESULTS: The study is ongoing and the results will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal for publication. CONCLUSION: This network meta-analysis will systematically provide suggestions to select optimum adjuvant treatment for clinical practice in the future. PROSPERO registration number: CRD42019123907 (https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/#searchadvanced).